Calxeda Ends ARM Server Bid

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Calxeda, a maker of ARM-based server SoCs, said it will close its doors. The startup was one of the first of as many as a dozen companies gearing up low-power, integrated processors using the ARM core.

Calxeda could not hold on until the emerging market becomes large enough to sustain it. But the loss does not impact the overall trend toward low-power servers, mainly driven by large datacenter operators such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

"The concept of a fabric of ARM-based servers challenging the industry giants was not on anyone's radar screen when we started this journey," the company said in a press release. "Carrying the load of industry pioneer has exceeded our ability to continue to operate as we had envisioned." The company will continue to support customers of its 32-bit ECX-2000 while it goes through a "restructuring process."

Part of the company's problem was the market for 32-bit ARM server SoCs did not pan out as it had hoped. "Calxeda had the right idea, but they started too soon," said Linley Gwennap, principal of the market watcher Linley Group, told us. "Once ARM announced a 64-bit architecture but didn't have a 64-bit core ready, it cut the knees out from Calxeda. Demand for 32-bit server chips, which was modest to start with, dried up, but Calxeda couldn't deliver a 64-bit processor until late 2014 -- as a startup, the funding simply wasn't going to last that long."

Calxeda first publicly talked about its 32-bit product in early 2011. Later that year, Hewlett-Packard said it was testing a prototype system using the product in its labs.

Calxeda sold some SoCs to a few relatively small computer makers that shipped systems, including Boston Computers and Penguin Computing. Marvell got one of the first major design wins for a 32-bit ARM SoC used as a storage controller at the Chinese web giant Baidu. Facebook said in August that it plans to use an Intel Atom SoC as a storage controller.

A server manager at Dell said in October that he did not see a large market for such controllers, and that the market for 64-bit ARM servers might not start in earnest until late 2014 or early 2015. That market is now well served by established companies that have announced product plans, including AMD, Applied Micro, Cavium, Marvell, Nvidia, and Samsung.

In January, Qualcomm advertised for engineers with ARM and server expertise. But this fall, a Qualcomm executive said it is monitoring the space but has no active plans for products.

@KB3001: Indeed Intel's multi hundred dollar Xeon processors may someday be a thing of the past (at least in volume servers) with the advent of multiple players selling integrated chips for the low tens of dollars

There is definitely a market for non-Intel servers, as customers have long tired of the Intel monopoly. AMD's x86 has fallen far behind, remarkably leaving ARM's licensees as the most viable contenders. But, there is no need for a 32-bit server in China or anywhere else. It was the only ARM ISA available when Calxeda got started, but it could never live as a product, so was at best a proof-of-concept, stepping stone to 64-bit. We will start to see ARM 64-bit servers emerge slowly in 2014, but too slowly for a company like Calxeda, that has to survive solely on that ramp. The needs of the server market are changing too, where Intel's historical strength of single thread performance is not a must-have for many of the new web server workloads. So, I see ARM eventually making a strong business in severs, but, yes, it is all about software, and that will take time.

You are challenging a perceived assertion with an assertion :) logic tells us that for LAMP servers, at least, custom SoC solutions based on ARM processors should perform better than Intel's on PPW. But even if we do not accept that, what about Performance Per Dollar? For the good of the end customer we need multiple providers. Intel's profit margins in the server market are ungodly and only competition can address that.

Tarra Tarra on fabrics, they're ahead of time on data center and enterprise adoption of something new by 2 to 3 years. Two to three years is the lithography advantage of exponential switch ports in silicon. Moore's axiom at work.

Intel has in the works but only fabicators can afford switch port integration ahead of silicon economics.

Consider cost : price of 10GbE switch ports within SOC total die area verse a dedicated top rack switch controller. Then please justify the cost price of integration into processor server SOC.

Fabric integration at 32 bit ARM code density, for LAMP Stack and cool storage, makes a Strong ARM. In this application a very fast network switch.

Solving large problems at good performance for watt ARM 32 can do now. And 64 bit if not held back by Intel Network. The target application is after hours batch processing. Or anything that has to do with ARM control plane and coprocessor application processing plane in real time.

DMcCunney, benchmarks in a microprocessor renaissance should not measure Intel performance through a system revolution. Data Centers and IT like their favorite benchmarks. ARM displacement of the Intel standard has nothing to do with Intel sales paradigm and everything to do with the evolutionary ARM sales paradigm.

That is all about end customer requirements.

And the hype wagon, including myself, did press for ARM server before whole product, because ARM server supports a microprocessor renaissance and the development jobs that evolve around it.

If your placed outside the Intel development circle, by Intel sales, ARM server is a good place to invest your development time and effort.

The opportunity in Arm Server is software first and foremost system hardware integration.

Probably the most intriguing thing about Calxeda shutting down is what happened to the Fabric. To elaborate, Calxeda had two things that were innovative - one was the use of existing power efficient 32b cores from the mobile space and applying them to server workloads, but the second was the ability to connect a large set of such processors using their "scale-out" fabric interconnect. I always thought that was the more important part of their story and the distinguishing feature.

I can only speculate here:

- Maybe the big OEMs did not adopt Calxeda's fabric pretty much negating their advantage. I am not sure if the moon-shot from HP used their fabric. I suspect it did not.

- Did their fabric not provide the scalability or performance needed for large clusters

- Maybe proprietary fabrics are not welcome in the data-center and existing solutions are sufficient ( I dont see how though)

Sorry to see them go and they were definitely ahead of their time with some innovative ideas. Well fought Calxeda! Well fought!

For sure, HPC benchmarks will show that even though ARM is much better at the overall PPW metric, when it comes to solving large problems / large data operations, Intel still beats ARM-based processors in PPW metric

PPW is not the be-all and end-all. What matter is lowest power at good performance. Calxeda was able to demonstrate PPW benefit for static web-tier work-loads but what they probably found was that it was not a large enough market to justify a business case around.

But that is not to say that custom ARM 64b cores from AppliedMicro, Broadcom etc will come out with significantly better performing cores.

For sure, HPC benchmarks will show that even though ARM is much better at the overall PPW metric, when it comes to solving large problems / large data operations, Intel still beats ARM-based processors in PPW metric.

I think you're correct, and the server market won't be monolithic. Whether Intel architecture or ARM architecture will get the nod will depends upon the expected role of the server. If what I want is a compute server, doing serious number crunching where I need results sooner rather than later, Intel may get the nod. Likewise, if I'm doing something like hosting a large Oracle database where I have a terabyte of tables in RAM and I want the fastest possible performance on queries and updates, Intel may get the nod.

If I'm someone like Google or Facebook, building out data centers with thousands of servers where the key is distributed processing, no one server will carry a really heavy load, and time to complete any particular function is less critical, I may opt for power savings over raw performance. As my load grows, I just add more servers, but more servers require more power, with increased costs for the power to run the servers, and the power run the cooling systems to keep the servers within an acceptable temperature range.

It will ultimately come down to money, and which approach offers the most bang for the buck, but what bang is will vary by customer and use case.

I expect a lot of amusement when 64 bit ARM CPUs start becoming available in quantity, with all manner of benchmarks purporting to show the superiority of one architecture over another. The key questions will be "What do the benchmarks measure?" and "How relevant are particular numbers to the intended application?"

DMcCunney: good analysis! I am of the opinion that the hype wagon went way before the horse in case of low power servers replacing Intel-based ones in the compute nodes. I remember seeing a demo of a 1RU server with 32 of the ARM processors last year where I challenged them to run Linpack BLAS C-version and compare with Intel-bases servers using Green500 power / watt (PPW) metric. Unfortunately I could not convince them to show the comparison! For sure, HPC benchmarks will show that even though ARM is much better at the overall PPW metric, when it comes to solving large problems / large data operations, Intel still beats ARM-based processors in PPW metric.

I imagine that "emerging market" also includes geographically emerging market such as China.

You may assume that "emerging market" is "anywhere in the world where servers will be deployed in quantity."

China is a huge market, period, so it makes perfect sense that Calxeda execs should pay a visit to Beijing. It would be a place to meet possible customers that might buy their solutions, and more important, to build essential relationships with the Chinese government to insure they were allowed to sell their products in China.